This has been circulated widely, but perhaps it is new to some of you:
"And seeing the multitudes, He went up on a mountain, and when He was seated His disciples came to Him. Then He opened His mouth and taught them, saying:
`Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.
Blessed are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted.
Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth.
Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they shall be filled.
Blessed are the merciful, for they shall obtain mercy.
Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God.
Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called sons of God.
Blessed are those who are persecuted for righteousness' sake, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.
Blessed are you when they revile and persecute you, and say all kinds of evil against you falsely for My sake.'" (Mt 5:1-11)
Then Simon Peter said, "Do we have to write this down?"
And Andrew said, "Are we supposed to know this?"
And Philip said, "What if we don't know it?"
And Bartholomew said, "Do we have to turn this in?"
And John said, "The other disciples didn't have to learn this."
And Matthew said, "When do we get out of here?"
And Judas said,' "What does this have to do with real life?"
Then one of the Pharisees present asked to see Jesus' lessonplans and inquired of Jesus his annual goals and short term objectives in the cognitive, affective and psychomotor domains.
And Jesus wept.
Those of you who are teachers can relate to this (all too well, I'm sure you would say). And all of us who have been students can recall having the same attitude in school: "If this isn't going to be on the test, then I'm not going to write it down, I'm not going to learn it, I'm not going to remember it, and you can't make me!"
Perhaps some of that same attitude carries over into the workplace. "If doing this doesn't contribute to my chances for a promotion down the road (translation: 'it's not on the test'), then I'm not about to put forth the extra effort it would require."
Or how about at church? Ever heard someone say, "I don't attend on Sunday nights and Wednesday nights because I don't think you have to do that to go to heaven"? (translation: "I don't think it's on the test")
At what point in our Christian lives did we turn from wanting to learn, wanting to grow, wanting to do everything we can possibly do for God, to doing the least amount necessary to just barely "pass the test"?
"This is my prayer for you: that your love will grow more and more; that you will have knowledge and understanding with your love; that you will see the difference between good and bad and will choose the good; that you will be pure and without wrong for the coming of Christ; that you will do many good things with the help of Christ to bring glory and praise to God." (Phil 1:9-11, NCV)
That truly is my prayer for each of you.
Wednesday, October 31, 2007
Tuesday, October 30, 2007
for son and tweeter concerning email not checked first w/snopes
Honesty is the best policy, but insanity is a better defense.
Monday, October 29, 2007
note from my next youngest brother
[Our academic backgrounds show in that he thinks this is funny and that I understand it.]
I need some queuing theory analysis for work and ran across this page http://www2.uwindsor.ca/~hlynka/qfun.html containing this joke:[The only person I can tell this to is another PhD in Physics I know at church.]Bill Becker (of Hitachi Data Systems) sent me the following story:For those who don't know, LK is a q theory founding father. You might try telling this at church or synagogue.I was attending a computer network performance management seminar conducted by none other than Leonard Kleinrock himself. (At the time, I had no idea who he was - this took place around 1985, or so.) He starts out his week-long intensive seminar with the statement:"Life is a queue. You come in, hang around for a bit, get some service, then depart."To which I commented"Is that a closed-loop or open-ended queue?"LK went silent and then proclaimed"That depends on your religious philosophy."
"Bella" means "beautiful"
2007Oct23
Late Sunday I returned from Florence, where I was making preparations for Catholic Answers' upcoming Rendezvous, which will be held there in April. A few days before I left on that trip, I met with Leo Severino, one of the producers of "Bella," which opens its theatrical release this Friday.
Severino left a DVD of the movie with me. Too busy to watch it before leaving for Italy, I just this morning finished viewing it. It was even better than he represented it to be. "Bella" is an intensely pro-life and pro-family film, yet the terms "pro-life" and "abortion" never appear in it. In no way preachy or propagandistic, the film conveys a strong message that love can overcome brokenness and that old sorrows do not have to be compounded with new sorrows.
"Bella" stars Eduardo Verastegui, who is hardly known in America but who achieved fame in Mexican soap operas, and Tammy Blanchard, who has acted in several television shows and who won an Emmy for playing the lead in a made-for-television movie about Judy Garland.
In "Bella" Blanchard plays a waitress who is fired on the day she discovers she is pregnant. Verastegui, a chef at the same restaurant, befriends her, losing his own job in the process. She comes from an unhappy home and does not want a child; he comes from a happy home but years before had his own life changed through a terrible accident. During the course of a day together each one begins a recovery. ...
And that is all I want to say about the plot, not wanting to be accused of being a spoiler.
I do want to say, though, that this is a remarkable movie, in several ways. It won the People's Choice Award at the Toronto Film Festival last year. Severino and the other principals behind the movie thought themselves lucky even to have "Bella" shown at the festival, which often showcases films that go on to win Oscars. They expected nothing because they were movie novices. "Bella" was a first-time effort for the producers, the director, the screenwriters, and for many of the actors.
Severino and the others behind the film are devout Catholics, several of them having come to or back to the Church only in recent years. Verastegui, for example, realized that the success he was having in Mexican soap operas was good for the bank account but not very good for the soul. He gave up a lucrative career to partner with Severino and director Alejandro Monteverde (they call themselves the Three Amigos) on a project that all three felt Providence called them to engage in.
When Severino was here on Oct1, he appeared on "Catholic Answers Live" and talked about the making of the movie. You can listened to that archived show at www.catholic.com. Afterwards, several of us went out to dinner, and during the course of the evening I asked what it would take for "Bella," which is opening this week in 31 markets, to become a nationwide success. Severino explained to us how the system works.
"Bella" is set for a two-week run. For it to be picked up for widespread national distribution, it needs to do well at the box office during those two weeks. No surprise there. But distributors and theater chains do not look only at the number of people walking through the theater door on opening night. They also look at the trend line over those two weeks.
Many movies do well their first weekend and then attract fewer and fewer visitors over the course of the following days. A movie that is strong on nights one and two but that cannot draw audiences for nights three through fourteen will not warrant the multi-million dollar investment required to have it open in hundreds of theaters around the country.
What the money men want to see is whether a movie still draws people the
second week. The crowds that show up the first weekend show up because of
the publicity surrounding a premiere (many viewers like to be "first" to see a film). The crowds that show up the second week do so because the reviews have been good or because word of mouth has touted the film. If the second week's box office receipts match or exceed the first week's, a movie has a good chance to go national in a big way--especially if it already has awards to its credit (such as the Toronto Film Festival award).
"Okay," I said to Severino, "but what does this mean in practice?" He said: "We need to get people to see the film during the second week." The opening weekend is important, but the second week is more important. There needs to be a clear upward trend if large-scale distribution is to happen.
I was impressed by Severino. He is intense, devout, and compelled. Like Verastegui, he gave up a lucrative career to work on "Bella." He had been with a high-power law firm in the Los Angeles area. He rediscovered his faith and felt God was calling him to do something more important with his life.
I hope he and his partners have much success with this film--first, because it really is a fine production and deserves to be recognized as such, and, second, because, if the movie succeeds, these fellows intend to produce more films of the same high caliber--high both in production values and in serious, morally uplifting content.
So here comes my request to you: Go and see "Bella." Take your entire family with you. Take your friends with you, if you have friends. Take strangers with you, if you do not have friends. But do not go during the first week. Go during the second week to help that trend line.
To find out whether you are in one of the 31 markets where the film debuts this weekend, visit www.bellathemovie.com, where you will find a list of cities and, for each city, a list of theaters where "Bella" will be shown. Once you have seen "Bella," talk it up to everyone on your e-mail list, and visit our forums and participate in discussions about the film.
Borrowing a line from Mother Teresa, we might say that Severino and the others want to "do something beautiful [bella] for God." I would like to see them succeed in that.
- Karl Keating
Late Sunday I returned from Florence, where I was making preparations for Catholic Answers' upcoming Rendezvous, which will be held there in April. A few days before I left on that trip, I met with Leo Severino, one of the producers of "Bella," which opens its theatrical release this Friday.
Severino left a DVD of the movie with me. Too busy to watch it before leaving for Italy, I just this morning finished viewing it. It was even better than he represented it to be. "Bella" is an intensely pro-life and pro-family film, yet the terms "pro-life" and "abortion" never appear in it. In no way preachy or propagandistic, the film conveys a strong message that love can overcome brokenness and that old sorrows do not have to be compounded with new sorrows.
"Bella" stars Eduardo Verastegui, who is hardly known in America but who achieved fame in Mexican soap operas, and Tammy Blanchard, who has acted in several television shows and who won an Emmy for playing the lead in a made-for-television movie about Judy Garland.
In "Bella" Blanchard plays a waitress who is fired on the day she discovers she is pregnant. Verastegui, a chef at the same restaurant, befriends her, losing his own job in the process. She comes from an unhappy home and does not want a child; he comes from a happy home but years before had his own life changed through a terrible accident. During the course of a day together each one begins a recovery. ...
And that is all I want to say about the plot, not wanting to be accused of being a spoiler.
I do want to say, though, that this is a remarkable movie, in several ways. It won the People's Choice Award at the Toronto Film Festival last year. Severino and the other principals behind the movie thought themselves lucky even to have "Bella" shown at the festival, which often showcases films that go on to win Oscars. They expected nothing because they were movie novices. "Bella" was a first-time effort for the producers, the director, the screenwriters, and for many of the actors.
Severino and the others behind the film are devout Catholics, several of them having come to or back to the Church only in recent years. Verastegui, for example, realized that the success he was having in Mexican soap operas was good for the bank account but not very good for the soul. He gave up a lucrative career to partner with Severino and director Alejandro Monteverde (they call themselves the Three Amigos) on a project that all three felt Providence called them to engage in.
When Severino was here on Oct1, he appeared on "Catholic Answers Live" and talked about the making of the movie. You can listened to that archived show at www.catholic.com. Afterwards, several of us went out to dinner, and during the course of the evening I asked what it would take for "Bella," which is opening this week in 31 markets, to become a nationwide success. Severino explained to us how the system works.
"Bella" is set for a two-week run. For it to be picked up for widespread national distribution, it needs to do well at the box office during those two weeks. No surprise there. But distributors and theater chains do not look only at the number of people walking through the theater door on opening night. They also look at the trend line over those two weeks.
Many movies do well their first weekend and then attract fewer and fewer visitors over the course of the following days. A movie that is strong on nights one and two but that cannot draw audiences for nights three through fourteen will not warrant the multi-million dollar investment required to have it open in hundreds of theaters around the country.
What the money men want to see is whether a movie still draws people the
second week. The crowds that show up the first weekend show up because of
the publicity surrounding a premiere (many viewers like to be "first" to see a film). The crowds that show up the second week do so because the reviews have been good or because word of mouth has touted the film. If the second week's box office receipts match or exceed the first week's, a movie has a good chance to go national in a big way--especially if it already has awards to its credit (such as the Toronto Film Festival award).
"Okay," I said to Severino, "but what does this mean in practice?" He said: "We need to get people to see the film during the second week." The opening weekend is important, but the second week is more important. There needs to be a clear upward trend if large-scale distribution is to happen.
I was impressed by Severino. He is intense, devout, and compelled. Like Verastegui, he gave up a lucrative career to work on "Bella." He had been with a high-power law firm in the Los Angeles area. He rediscovered his faith and felt God was calling him to do something more important with his life.
I hope he and his partners have much success with this film--first, because it really is a fine production and deserves to be recognized as such, and, second, because, if the movie succeeds, these fellows intend to produce more films of the same high caliber--high both in production values and in serious, morally uplifting content.
So here comes my request to you: Go and see "Bella." Take your entire family with you. Take your friends with you, if you have friends. Take strangers with you, if you do not have friends. But do not go during the first week. Go during the second week to help that trend line.
To find out whether you are in one of the 31 markets where the film debuts this weekend, visit www.bellathemovie.com, where you will find a list of cities and, for each city, a list of theaters where "Bella" will be shown. Once you have seen "Bella," talk it up to everyone on your e-mail list, and visit our forums and participate in discussions about the film.
Borrowing a line from Mother Teresa, we might say that Severino and the others want to "do something beautiful [bella] for God." I would like to see them succeed in that.
- Karl Keating
Friday, October 26, 2007
Good story
Even if computers and the players mean nothing to you, it's a good story.
I'm currently working on a new version of the IBM vs PSI analysis, based upon IBM's Amended Complaint and PSI's response thereto. Because this set of documents essentially represents the endgame, I'm taking a little time.http://www.isham-research.co.uk/
But I was forced into spontaneous gigglery (think LOL, ROTF,LMAO) when I read IBM's petty grumble about "IBM Confidential" materials.
The fire is out and the ashes are cold - some of the stories can be told.
IBM has _NEVER_ been security-conscious. Even to today. Idiots, who've failed to take on board the most elementary principles. Every IBMer in such a situation should read R. V. Jones' discussion of "working fiction" during the U-boat war. And take note - it's a seminal text on how to drag something out of what looks like nothing.
In the very early 1990s - 1990 or 1991, I can't be bothered to check - IBM set up a meeting in Dublin for all of the competitive marketing people in Europe. Oh, dear Lord - run by the Danes. Next time pick people with smaller egos. Incredibly, IBM had published (and still publishes) the internal structure of this group via Blue Pages. Equally incredibly, they always used the same hotels in every European city. A few beers and a good meal for a few staff in each of their hotels earned a stream of: "Guess who's booked twenty rooms next Friday?"
And so it was in Dublin this time. People whom one would expect to be there 'disappeared' from their geographies. You got a customer to call: "Sorry - he's back on Friday". In some cases we had flight numbers.
So with moderate effort you could reproduce the list of attendees.
Now - there is a general principle within most European countries of "totters rights" What this means is that what you discard (in the trash) is no longer yours. For a variety of legal reasons (to do with liability about its treatment) ownership and legal title passes to the cleasing/refuse department. It's theirs to do what they want with it. And they have an obligation at law to get the best price for all the recyclable material they collect.
All meetings and conferences are the same. There's always someone who doesn't turn up. Business commitments change, grandmothers get ill.
So a very simple offer to the Dublin Cleansing Authority (actually privatized, but that's a detail) for GBP1 for every 1lb weight of materials marked "IBM Confidential" was not only 100% legal but also quite productive.
Two complete copies of the secret squirrel manual and the handouts. GBP10 plus the airfare and one night in the Connaught on the same square. And a receipt.
Followed by a discussion with corporate counsel. "How did you get this?" "Here's the receipt."
Every page had to be marked with its certified origin, etc.
For a lot of people I know - and certainly for myself - "IBM Confidential" at the bottom of a page effectively means "Please turn over". Those familiar with my dispute with IBM's aßhole lawyer will know I sent them 13 (thirteen) warnings about the z890 data before using it. And being shat on for my trouble.
I've now got more than one unsolicited copy of the z6 stuff [not yet publically announced] - what in hell am I (or we, including PSI) supposed to do about this?
Thursday, October 25, 2007
spell check bytes hand that feeds it
Friday, December 7, 2007: Sharing the Spirit of the Season – Gift Exchange. Team members can bring in their contributions, toys, food, clothing, excreta, starting 2009Nov19. More information will be sent out later.
[If you wish to try this at home, in any program with a spellcheck facility, enter the word excetra and spell check. Please let me know if you get Et cetera. MSWord gets the above interesting word.]
[If you wish to try this at home, in any program with a spellcheck facility, enter the word excetra and spell check. Please let me know if you get Et cetera. MSWord gets the above interesting word.]
Monday, October 22, 2007
In explaining any puzzling Washington phenomenon,
... always choose stupidity over conspiracy, incompetence over cunning. Anything else gives them too much credit. - Charles Krauthammer q.tftd-l
[I agree.]
[I agree.]
Wednesday, October 17, 2007
some of my best friends were mushrooms
Five couples in a neighborhood decided to get together on a regular basis and socialize. As a result, they formed a dinner club and agreed to meet for dinner at a different neighbors' house each month.
When it came time for Jimmy and Susie Brown to have the dinner at their house, like most women, Susie wanted to outdo all the others and prepare a meal that was the best that any of them had ever lapped a lip over.
A few days before the big event, Susie got out her cookbook and decided to have mushroom-smothered steak. When she went to the store to buy some mushrooms, she found the price was far more than she wanted to pay. She then told her husband, "I think we aren't going to have mushrooms because they are too expensive."
He said , "Why don't you go down in the pasture and pick some of those mushrooms? There are plenty of them right in the creek bed."
She said, "No, I have heard that wild mushrooms can be poisonous."
He then said, "I don't think so. I see the varmints eating them all the time and it never has affected them."
After thinking about this, Susie decided to give this a try and got in the pickup and went down in the pasture and picked some mushrooms. She brought them back home and washed, sliced, and diced them to get them ready to go over her smothered steak. Then she went out on the back porch and got Ol' Spot's (the yard dog) bowl and gave him a double handful, putting a mess of bacon grease on them to make them tasty. Ol' Spot didn't slow down until he had eaten every bite. All morning long, Susie watched him and the wild mushrooms didn't seem to affect him, so she decided to use them.
The meal was a great success, and Susie even hired a lady she knew from town to come out and help her serve. She had on a white apron and a little cap on her head. It was first class. After everyone had finished, they all began to kick back and relax and socialize. The men were visiting and the women started to gossip a bit.
About this time, the lady from town came in from the kitchen and whispered in Susie's ear. She said, "Mrs. Brown, Spot just died." With this news, Susie went into hysterics. After she finally calmed down, she called the doctor and told him what had happened. The doctor said, "It's bad, but being this early we can take care of it. I will call for an ambulance and I will be there as quick as I can. We'll give everyone enemas and we will pump out everyone's stomach. Everything will be fine. Just keep them all there and keep them calm."
It wasn't long until they could hear the wail of the siren as the ambulance was coming down the road. When they got there, the EMTs got out with their suitcases, syringes, and a stomach pump. The doctor arrived shortly thereafter. One by one, they took each person into the master bathroom, gave them an enema, and pumped out their stomach. After the last one was finished, the doctor came out and said, "I think everything will be fine now," and he left. They looked pretty peaked sitting around the living room.
About that time, the hired lady from town came in and said, "You know, I think the fellow that drove the ambulance looks just like the one who ran over Spot an hour ago, but he didn't stop so I can't be certain." - Rick
When it came time for Jimmy and Susie Brown to have the dinner at their house, like most women, Susie wanted to outdo all the others and prepare a meal that was the best that any of them had ever lapped a lip over.
A few days before the big event, Susie got out her cookbook and decided to have mushroom-smothered steak. When she went to the store to buy some mushrooms, she found the price was far more than she wanted to pay. She then told her husband, "I think we aren't going to have mushrooms because they are too expensive."
He said , "Why don't you go down in the pasture and pick some of those mushrooms? There are plenty of them right in the creek bed."
She said, "No, I have heard that wild mushrooms can be poisonous."
He then said, "I don't think so. I see the varmints eating them all the time and it never has affected them."
After thinking about this, Susie decided to give this a try and got in the pickup and went down in the pasture and picked some mushrooms. She brought them back home and washed, sliced, and diced them to get them ready to go over her smothered steak. Then she went out on the back porch and got Ol' Spot's (the yard dog) bowl and gave him a double handful, putting a mess of bacon grease on them to make them tasty. Ol' Spot didn't slow down until he had eaten every bite. All morning long, Susie watched him and the wild mushrooms didn't seem to affect him, so she decided to use them.
The meal was a great success, and Susie even hired a lady she knew from town to come out and help her serve. She had on a white apron and a little cap on her head. It was first class. After everyone had finished, they all began to kick back and relax and socialize. The men were visiting and the women started to gossip a bit.
About this time, the lady from town came in from the kitchen and whispered in Susie's ear. She said, "Mrs. Brown, Spot just died." With this news, Susie went into hysterics. After she finally calmed down, she called the doctor and told him what had happened. The doctor said, "It's bad, but being this early we can take care of it. I will call for an ambulance and I will be there as quick as I can. We'll give everyone enemas and we will pump out everyone's stomach. Everything will be fine. Just keep them all there and keep them calm."
It wasn't long until they could hear the wail of the siren as the ambulance was coming down the road. When they got there, the EMTs got out with their suitcases, syringes, and a stomach pump. The doctor arrived shortly thereafter. One by one, they took each person into the master bathroom, gave them an enema, and pumped out their stomach. After the last one was finished, the doctor came out and said, "I think everything will be fine now," and he left. They looked pretty peaked sitting around the living room.
About that time, the hired lady from town came in and said, "You know, I think the fellow that drove the ambulance looks just like the one who ran over Spot an hour ago, but he didn't stop so I can't be certain." - Rick
Tuesday, October 16, 2007
Nine Lives: what cats know about war
2007Oct14
IT was a bitterly cold night in the Baghdad winter of 2005, somewhere in the predawn hours before the staccato of suicide bombs and mortars and gunfire that are the daily orchestration of the war. Alone in my office in The Times’s compound beside the Tigris River, I was awaiting the telephoned “goodnight” from The Times foreign desk, eight time zones west, signaling that my work for the next day’s paper was done.
That is when I heard it: the cry of an abandoned kitten, somewhere out in the darkness, calling for its mother somewhere inside the compound. By an animal lover’s anthropomorphic logic, those desperate calls, three nights running, had come to seem more than the appeal of a tiny creature doomed to a cold and lonely death. Deep in the winter night, they seemed like a dismal tocsin for all who suffer in a time of war.
With others working for The Times in Baghdad, I took solace in the battalion of cats that had found their way past the 12-foot-high concrete blast walls that guard our compound. With their survival instincts, the cats of our neighborhood learned in the first winter of the war that food and shelter and human kindness lay within the walls. Outside, among the garbage heaps and sinuous alleyways, human beings were struggling for their own survival, and a cat’s life was likely to be meager, embattled and short.
Cat populations in the wild expand arithmetically with the supply of food, and ours multiplied rapidly, with as many as two or three litters at a time out in the shrubbery of our gardens, or beneath our water tanks.
Soon, our compound was home to as many as 60 cats at a time, their numbers carefully tallied by Younis and Saif, the enthusiastic young Iraqis who prepared heaped platters of rice and lamb and beef — and, as a special treat, cans of cat food trucked across the desert from Jordan, over highways synonymous with ambushes, kidnappings and bombings. As The Times’s bureau chief, part of my routine was to ask, each night, how many cats we had seated for dinner. In a place where we could do little else to relieve the war’s miseries, the tally became a measure of one small thing we could do to favor life over death. The American military command has a battery of “metrics” to gauge progress, and the nightly headcount of the cats became my personal measure, my mood varying as the numbers went up and down. Sometimes they went sharply down, during winter epidemics of cat flu, or after attacks by the compound’s two dogs (war refugees themselves) that proved, as they grew beyond puppies, to have a feral antipathy to cats programmed in their bones.
Not everyone in the compound saw the burgeoning cat population so fondly. Some, including my wife, Jane, who works as the compound’s chief administrator, loves cats as much as anyone, but thought matters had gotten out of hand when middle-of-the-night fights between the dominant males outside our building threatened to wake the devil, or when suppertime walks past the “cat motel” we built from a stack of water-bottle crates outside one of our kitchens turned into a pied-piper’s epic, each step followed by dozens of hungry, impatient meowing creatures.
One control measure, having the cats spayed, was unavailable, since all of Baghdad’s domestic-animal veterinarians seemed to have fled, among hundreds of thousands of other Iraqis who have sought sanctuary abroad. One attempt at neutering our female dog, Itchy, by a farm-animal vet, nearly killed her.
There were warnings, too, from the American military command, which imposed a ban, for American troops, on adopting stray animals, or feeding them. The Army’s General Order No. 1, setting out rules of conduct, bans, at least in theory, the age-old military tradition of keeping animal mascots, other than bomb-sniffing dogs.
“They’re cute, furry, and more dangerous than you think,” one command bulletin this year said, speaking of cats and dogs. Maj. Robert A. Goodman, chief of veterinary services for the Army’s 248th Medical Detachment, highlighted the rabies threat. “There’s nothing compassionate about compassionate feeding,” he said. “They’re increasing the risk of disease.”
Still, many troops in Afghanistan and Iraq ignore the ban.
Other bulletins from the American command have reviewed the ethics of feeding strays, saying that animal lovers among the troops do more harm than good when they accustom cats and dogs to a regular supply of food and affection — only to abandon them when they rotate home, leaving the animals depleted in their instinct to fend for themselves. At The Times’s compound, too, we have never been certain how long we will remain in Iraq. But in my mind, at least, the benefits to the cats and our own morale outweighed the longer-term concerns, the more so because conditions beyond our walls seemed to offer scant prospects that most of them, denied our shelter, would survive for long anyway.
On that bitter night in 2005, I went a step further. Making my way to a veranda overlooking the spot where the kitten was crying, I “bombed” it with a feather duvet off an absent colleague’s bed before it could scoot into an inaccessible recess in a garden wall. Thus did we acquire Scooter — white, with flecks of ginger and tabby, a female of extraordinary agility, who found a way, when still no bigger than the palm of my hand, to leap and claw her way out of a cardboard packing case five feet high.
Watching her, and the two litters of kittens she had over the following 18 months, offered we humans a new reaction to the cacophony of the war. The bloodiest suicide bombings, even miles away, have the sound and feel of the apocalypse, causing humans to freeze, no matter how often they experience it. Cats need to hear it only once. As they skitter to the safety of trees and bushes, they enter the blast and the tremor on the hard drive of their brains. On the next occasion, come the blast, they barely stir.
Mongrels though they are, our Baghdad cats, we learned from a recent study in the journal Science, have a noble lineage of their own — as inheritors of the same terrain occupied by the felines that were the forebears of all domestic cats, wild families that lived along the banks of the Tigris and Euphrates more than 10,000 years ago.
But Scooter had her own ticket out of Iraq booked from the moment I clutched her in the duvet’s folds. By August of this year, she had three 12-week-old kittens, each bearing the name of an American war machine — Apache (Patch, for short), Bradley and Stryker. The names were chosen, in part, in the hope that we might eventually find American veterans of the war, now home, to adopt them. We already have a cat in England, Scuzzie, who joined the family when he strayed into our home in New Delhi 13 summers ago to escape a monsoon, and he exhibits claws-out hostility to any other cat entering his domain.
Scooter and her kittens were fated to endure six months under rabies watch in a quarantine kennel in England, and it was shortly after her arrival there that we learned she was pregnant again. This has since raised the family in quarantine to seven.
But that lay ahead when I arrived at the Baghdad airport one recent summer day with the crate carrying the four cats. Getting them that far had been a saga, finding Iraqi health officials ready to issue and counterstamp fit-to-travel documents; negotiating the 12 hazardous miles to the airport through an obstacle course of checkpoints where soldiers and policemen have been trained to destroy on sight any “suspicious package”; and persuading wary airline personnel to clear the cat crate for loading.
The process took hours, and left me exhausted, sitting on the terminal’s marble floor beside the cats, as the time for boarding approached.
All about was hubbub, with hundreds of angry, fearful Iraqis struggling to secure their own passage out. The cats seemed terrified, so I fell once more into my anthropomorphic mode, offering them a quiet discourse on what lay ahead — the 3,000-mile air journey, detention in the quarantine center and, ultimately, liberation into a green and pleasant land where they would be full citizens, never again wanting for shelter, warmth and food.
A small crowd of Iraqis had gathered, and one among them, a middle-aged man who introduced himself as a physician traveling to Jordan to see his ailing mother, knelt down beside me and asked, in halting English, if I’d mind a question. By all means, I said. “Well then,” he said, his face breaking into a sad smile, “what I want to ask is this: This proposal you make, is it for four legs only, or also for two? Six months’ detention, British passport, free to stay, guaranteed home, this is excellent. I will take, and many other Iraqis, too.”
- John F. Burns in the nytimes q.map via internet
IT was a bitterly cold night in the Baghdad winter of 2005, somewhere in the predawn hours before the staccato of suicide bombs and mortars and gunfire that are the daily orchestration of the war. Alone in my office in The Times’s compound beside the Tigris River, I was awaiting the telephoned “goodnight” from The Times foreign desk, eight time zones west, signaling that my work for the next day’s paper was done.
That is when I heard it: the cry of an abandoned kitten, somewhere out in the darkness, calling for its mother somewhere inside the compound. By an animal lover’s anthropomorphic logic, those desperate calls, three nights running, had come to seem more than the appeal of a tiny creature doomed to a cold and lonely death. Deep in the winter night, they seemed like a dismal tocsin for all who suffer in a time of war.
With others working for The Times in Baghdad, I took solace in the battalion of cats that had found their way past the 12-foot-high concrete blast walls that guard our compound. With their survival instincts, the cats of our neighborhood learned in the first winter of the war that food and shelter and human kindness lay within the walls. Outside, among the garbage heaps and sinuous alleyways, human beings were struggling for their own survival, and a cat’s life was likely to be meager, embattled and short.
Cat populations in the wild expand arithmetically with the supply of food, and ours multiplied rapidly, with as many as two or three litters at a time out in the shrubbery of our gardens, or beneath our water tanks.
Soon, our compound was home to as many as 60 cats at a time, their numbers carefully tallied by Younis and Saif, the enthusiastic young Iraqis who prepared heaped platters of rice and lamb and beef — and, as a special treat, cans of cat food trucked across the desert from Jordan, over highways synonymous with ambushes, kidnappings and bombings. As The Times’s bureau chief, part of my routine was to ask, each night, how many cats we had seated for dinner. In a place where we could do little else to relieve the war’s miseries, the tally became a measure of one small thing we could do to favor life over death. The American military command has a battery of “metrics” to gauge progress, and the nightly headcount of the cats became my personal measure, my mood varying as the numbers went up and down. Sometimes they went sharply down, during winter epidemics of cat flu, or after attacks by the compound’s two dogs (war refugees themselves) that proved, as they grew beyond puppies, to have a feral antipathy to cats programmed in their bones.
Not everyone in the compound saw the burgeoning cat population so fondly. Some, including my wife, Jane, who works as the compound’s chief administrator, loves cats as much as anyone, but thought matters had gotten out of hand when middle-of-the-night fights between the dominant males outside our building threatened to wake the devil, or when suppertime walks past the “cat motel” we built from a stack of water-bottle crates outside one of our kitchens turned into a pied-piper’s epic, each step followed by dozens of hungry, impatient meowing creatures.
One control measure, having the cats spayed, was unavailable, since all of Baghdad’s domestic-animal veterinarians seemed to have fled, among hundreds of thousands of other Iraqis who have sought sanctuary abroad. One attempt at neutering our female dog, Itchy, by a farm-animal vet, nearly killed her.
There were warnings, too, from the American military command, which imposed a ban, for American troops, on adopting stray animals, or feeding them. The Army’s General Order No. 1, setting out rules of conduct, bans, at least in theory, the age-old military tradition of keeping animal mascots, other than bomb-sniffing dogs.
“They’re cute, furry, and more dangerous than you think,” one command bulletin this year said, speaking of cats and dogs. Maj. Robert A. Goodman, chief of veterinary services for the Army’s 248th Medical Detachment, highlighted the rabies threat. “There’s nothing compassionate about compassionate feeding,” he said. “They’re increasing the risk of disease.”
Still, many troops in Afghanistan and Iraq ignore the ban.
Other bulletins from the American command have reviewed the ethics of feeding strays, saying that animal lovers among the troops do more harm than good when they accustom cats and dogs to a regular supply of food and affection — only to abandon them when they rotate home, leaving the animals depleted in their instinct to fend for themselves. At The Times’s compound, too, we have never been certain how long we will remain in Iraq. But in my mind, at least, the benefits to the cats and our own morale outweighed the longer-term concerns, the more so because conditions beyond our walls seemed to offer scant prospects that most of them, denied our shelter, would survive for long anyway.
On that bitter night in 2005, I went a step further. Making my way to a veranda overlooking the spot where the kitten was crying, I “bombed” it with a feather duvet off an absent colleague’s bed before it could scoot into an inaccessible recess in a garden wall. Thus did we acquire Scooter — white, with flecks of ginger and tabby, a female of extraordinary agility, who found a way, when still no bigger than the palm of my hand, to leap and claw her way out of a cardboard packing case five feet high.
Watching her, and the two litters of kittens she had over the following 18 months, offered we humans a new reaction to the cacophony of the war. The bloodiest suicide bombings, even miles away, have the sound and feel of the apocalypse, causing humans to freeze, no matter how often they experience it. Cats need to hear it only once. As they skitter to the safety of trees and bushes, they enter the blast and the tremor on the hard drive of their brains. On the next occasion, come the blast, they barely stir.
Mongrels though they are, our Baghdad cats, we learned from a recent study in the journal Science, have a noble lineage of their own — as inheritors of the same terrain occupied by the felines that were the forebears of all domestic cats, wild families that lived along the banks of the Tigris and Euphrates more than 10,000 years ago.
But Scooter had her own ticket out of Iraq booked from the moment I clutched her in the duvet’s folds. By August of this year, she had three 12-week-old kittens, each bearing the name of an American war machine — Apache (Patch, for short), Bradley and Stryker. The names were chosen, in part, in the hope that we might eventually find American veterans of the war, now home, to adopt them. We already have a cat in England, Scuzzie, who joined the family when he strayed into our home in New Delhi 13 summers ago to escape a monsoon, and he exhibits claws-out hostility to any other cat entering his domain.
Scooter and her kittens were fated to endure six months under rabies watch in a quarantine kennel in England, and it was shortly after her arrival there that we learned she was pregnant again. This has since raised the family in quarantine to seven.
But that lay ahead when I arrived at the Baghdad airport one recent summer day with the crate carrying the four cats. Getting them that far had been a saga, finding Iraqi health officials ready to issue and counterstamp fit-to-travel documents; negotiating the 12 hazardous miles to the airport through an obstacle course of checkpoints where soldiers and policemen have been trained to destroy on sight any “suspicious package”; and persuading wary airline personnel to clear the cat crate for loading.
The process took hours, and left me exhausted, sitting on the terminal’s marble floor beside the cats, as the time for boarding approached.
All about was hubbub, with hundreds of angry, fearful Iraqis struggling to secure their own passage out. The cats seemed terrified, so I fell once more into my anthropomorphic mode, offering them a quiet discourse on what lay ahead — the 3,000-mile air journey, detention in the quarantine center and, ultimately, liberation into a green and pleasant land where they would be full citizens, never again wanting for shelter, warmth and food.
A small crowd of Iraqis had gathered, and one among them, a middle-aged man who introduced himself as a physician traveling to Jordan to see his ailing mother, knelt down beside me and asked, in halting English, if I’d mind a question. By all means, I said. “Well then,” he said, his face breaking into a sad smile, “what I want to ask is this: This proposal you make, is it for four legs only, or also for two? Six months’ detention, British passport, free to stay, guaranteed home, this is excellent. I will take, and many other Iraqis, too.”
- John F. Burns in the nytimes q.map via internet
Saturday, October 13, 2007
Ambushed soldiers weapons recovered
Friday 2007Oct12 13:20:48 EDT
Weapons identified as those belonging to 10th Mountain Division soldiers kidnapped and killed in a May 12 ambush were recovered near Baghdad on Tuesday, the Army announced in a press release. According to the release, the weapons were found by soldiers from 2nd Battalion, 14th Infantry, 2nd Brigade Combat Team, 10th Mountain Division after Iraqi citizens led them to a cache in a house about seven miles north of the ambush site.
The May 12 attack, in which four soldiers and an Iraqi interpreter were killed, took place southwest of Baghdad in the Quarghulli village near Yusufiyah. The body of one soldier, Pfc. Joseph Anzack, was found floating in the Euphrates River 11 days later, and two other soldiers, Spc. Alex Jimenez and Pvt. Byron Fouty, are still missing.
The soldiers, all from 4th Battalion, 31st Infantry in 2nd BCT, were on a combat patrol when the attack took place. The cache discovered Tuesday consisted of 28 blasting caps in their original packaging, 50 pounds of homemade explosives, three 60 mm mortar rounds, an AK47 rifle and matching rigged pouch, two U.S. M-4s, one with an M203 grenade launcher attached, a single M203 and an M249 squad automatic weapon.
After finding the M4s and the M203, the release stated, analysts checked each of the serial numbers and determined that the M249 belonged to Jimenez. One of the M4s with the M203 attached belonged to Sgt. Anthony Schoeber, who was killed in the attack, and another M4 belonged to Anzack.
The soldiers' identification cards and wallets were found in mid-June in an al-Qaida safe house in Samara, about 75 miles north of Yusufiyah. These weapons are the first piece of physical evidence in the 2nd BCT's area of operations, according to the release.
Jimenez and Fouty are listed by the Army as missing-captured. There are two other soldiers in the same category, Staff Sgt. Matt Maupin, who disappeared in an ambush on his fuel convoy on April 9, 2004, and Spc. Ahmed Altaie, who has been missing since he was kidnapped by masked gunmen in a Baghdad neighborhood 2006Oct23 , while visiting his Iraqi wife.
During the search Tuesday, soldiers also discovered a manmade hide site near the house where the weapons were discovered. Nine locals were detained and are being questioned.
The recovered weapons will be turned over to the Criminal Investigations Department for fingerprints and DNA samples, the release stated.
The 2nd BCT soldiers will continue to search for more evidence that can lead them to the missing soldiers or the attackers, but the brigade is scheduled to return to its home base at Fort Drum, N.Y., by mid-November. It will be replaced by the 3rd BCT, 101st Airborne Division from Fort Campbell, Ky., which deployed in September.
- Gina Cavallaro, Staff writer
Weapons identified as those belonging to 10th Mountain Division soldiers kidnapped and killed in a May 12 ambush were recovered near Baghdad on Tuesday, the Army announced in a press release. According to the release, the weapons were found by soldiers from 2nd Battalion, 14th Infantry, 2nd Brigade Combat Team, 10th Mountain Division after Iraqi citizens led them to a cache in a house about seven miles north of the ambush site.
The May 12 attack, in which four soldiers and an Iraqi interpreter were killed, took place southwest of Baghdad in the Quarghulli village near Yusufiyah. The body of one soldier, Pfc. Joseph Anzack, was found floating in the Euphrates River 11 days later, and two other soldiers, Spc. Alex Jimenez and Pvt. Byron Fouty, are still missing.
The soldiers, all from 4th Battalion, 31st Infantry in 2nd BCT, were on a combat patrol when the attack took place. The cache discovered Tuesday consisted of 28 blasting caps in their original packaging, 50 pounds of homemade explosives, three 60 mm mortar rounds, an AK47 rifle and matching rigged pouch, two U.S. M-4s, one with an M203 grenade launcher attached, a single M203 and an M249 squad automatic weapon.
After finding the M4s and the M203, the release stated, analysts checked each of the serial numbers and determined that the M249 belonged to Jimenez. One of the M4s with the M203 attached belonged to Sgt. Anthony Schoeber, who was killed in the attack, and another M4 belonged to Anzack.
The soldiers' identification cards and wallets were found in mid-June in an al-Qaida safe house in Samara, about 75 miles north of Yusufiyah. These weapons are the first piece of physical evidence in the 2nd BCT's area of operations, according to the release.
Jimenez and Fouty are listed by the Army as missing-captured. There are two other soldiers in the same category, Staff Sgt. Matt Maupin, who disappeared in an ambush on his fuel convoy on April 9, 2004, and Spc. Ahmed Altaie, who has been missing since he was kidnapped by masked gunmen in a Baghdad neighborhood 2006Oct23 , while visiting his Iraqi wife.
During the search Tuesday, soldiers also discovered a manmade hide site near the house where the weapons were discovered. Nine locals were detained and are being questioned.
The recovered weapons will be turned over to the Criminal Investigations Department for fingerprints and DNA samples, the release stated.
The 2nd BCT soldiers will continue to search for more evidence that can lead them to the missing soldiers or the attackers, but the brigade is scheduled to return to its home base at Fort Drum, N.Y., by mid-November. It will be replaced by the 3rd BCT, 101st Airborne Division from Fort Campbell, Ky., which deployed in September.
- Gina Cavallaro, Staff writer
Staff report - Friday 2007Oct12 5:27:16 EDT
About 60 soldiers from 2nd Brigade, 10th Mountain Division are scheduled to return Friday to Fort Drum NY.
The soldiers spent 15 months in south Baghdad. The brigade has the most months deployed of any Army brigade since 2001, according to Army data.
This first group of soldiers, known as the torch party, will help with re-deployment efforts for the rest of the brigade's 3,500 soldiers. Most of the brigade will be home by the second week of November.
Soldiers from 3rd Brigade, 101st Airborne Division will replace 2nd Brigade, 10th Mountain in south Baghdad, under Multi-National Division-Center. Third Brigade, 101st Airborne, now on its fourth deployment, will continue the search for Spc. Alex Jimenez and Pvt. Byron Fouty, two
soldiers from 2nd Brigade, 10th Mountain who were captured by insurgent forces after their patrol was attacked May 12.
The soldiers spent 15 months in south Baghdad. The brigade has the most months deployed of any Army brigade since 2001, according to Army data.
This first group of soldiers, known as the torch party, will help with re-deployment efforts for the rest of the brigade's 3,500 soldiers. Most of the brigade will be home by the second week of November.
Soldiers from 3rd Brigade, 101st Airborne Division will replace 2nd Brigade, 10th Mountain in south Baghdad, under Multi-National Division-Center. Third Brigade, 101st Airborne, now on its fourth deployment, will continue the search for Spc. Alex Jimenez and Pvt. Byron Fouty, two
soldiers from 2nd Brigade, 10th Mountain who were captured by insurgent forces after their patrol was attacked May 12.
Praise the Lord
from my son
I have returned to Fort Drum intact again. I was one of the 61 men who flew in late last night. I'm enjoying time off with the family now and will prepare for the remainder of the Battalion's return.
[the background facts #1]
[the background facts #2]
I have returned to Fort Drum intact again. I was one of the 61 men who flew in late last night. I'm enjoying time off with the family now and will prepare for the remainder of the Battalion's return.
[the background facts #1]
[the background facts #2]
Wednesday, October 3, 2007
A.A.A.D.D.
Age Activated Attention Deficit Disorder
Son claims to have it -- if so it is genetic -- I have always had it!
This is how it manifests:
I decide to water my garden. As I turn on the hose in the driveway, I look over at my car and decide it needs washing. As I start toward the garage, I notice mail on the porch table that I brought up from the mail box earlier. I decide to go through the mail before I wash the car. I lay my car keys on the table, put the junk mail in the garbage can under the table, and notice that the can is full. So, I decide to put the bills back on the table and take out the garbage first. But then I think, since I'm going to be near the mailbox when I take out the garbage anyway, I may as well pay the bills first. I take my check book off the table, and see that there is only one check left. My extra checks are in my desk in the study, so I go inside the house to my desk where I find the can of Coke I'd been drinking. I'm going to look for my checks, but first I need to push the Coke aside so that I don't accidentally knock it over. The Coke is getting warm, and I decide to put it in the refrigerator to keep it cold. As I head toward the kitchen with the Coke, a vase of flowers on the counter catches my eye--they need water. I put the Coke on the counter and discover my reading glasses that I've been searching for all morning. I decide I better put them back on my desk, but first I'm going to water the flowers. I set the glasses back down on the counter, fill a container with water and suddenly spot the TV remote. Someone left it on the kitchen table. I realize that tonight when we go to watch TV, I'll be looking for the remote, but I won't remember that it's on the kitchen table, so I decide to put it back in the den where it belongs, but first I'll water the flowers. I pour some water in the flowers, but quite a bit of it spills on the floor. So, I set the remote back on the table, get some towels and wipe up the spill. Then, I head down the hall trying to remember what I was planning to do. At the end of the day:
Do me a favor.
Forward the link to this message to everyone you know, because I don't remember who on earth I've sent it to.
Son claims to have it -- if so it is genetic -- I have always had it!
This is how it manifests:
I decide to water my garden. As I turn on the hose in the driveway, I look over at my car and decide it needs washing. As I start toward the garage, I notice mail on the porch table that I brought up from the mail box earlier. I decide to go through the mail before I wash the car. I lay my car keys on the table, put the junk mail in the garbage can under the table, and notice that the can is full. So, I decide to put the bills back on the table and take out the garbage first. But then I think, since I'm going to be near the mailbox when I take out the garbage anyway, I may as well pay the bills first. I take my check book off the table, and see that there is only one check left. My extra checks are in my desk in the study, so I go inside the house to my desk where I find the can of Coke I'd been drinking. I'm going to look for my checks, but first I need to push the Coke aside so that I don't accidentally knock it over. The Coke is getting warm, and I decide to put it in the refrigerator to keep it cold. As I head toward the kitchen with the Coke, a vase of flowers on the counter catches my eye--they need water. I put the Coke on the counter and discover my reading glasses that I've been searching for all morning. I decide I better put them back on my desk, but first I'm going to water the flowers. I set the glasses back down on the counter, fill a container with water and suddenly spot the TV remote. Someone left it on the kitchen table. I realize that tonight when we go to watch TV, I'll be looking for the remote, but I won't remember that it's on the kitchen table, so I decide to put it back in the den where it belongs, but first I'll water the flowers. I pour some water in the flowers, but quite a bit of it spills on the floor. So, I set the remote back on the table, get some towels and wipe up the spill. Then, I head down the hall trying to remember what I was planning to do. At the end of the day:
- The car isn't washed
- The bills aren't paid
- there is a warm can of Coke e sitting on the counter
- The flowers don't have enough water,
- there is still only 1 check in my check book,
- I can't find the remote,
- I can't find my glasses,
- and, I don't remember what I did with the car keys.
Do me a favor.
Forward the link to this message to everyone you know, because I don't remember who on earth I've sent it to.
Monday, October 1, 2007
the great "This is True" link point
TIRED OF BEING TOLD WHERE TO GO? "Get Out of Hell Free" with our popular and (in?)famous cards, created in response to a reader insisting that Randy was doomed. http://www.GOOHF.com
SUBSCRIPTIONS to "This is True" are free at http://www.thisistrue.com Published weekly by ThisIsTrue.Inc, PO Box 666, Ridgway CO 81432 USA (ISSN 1521-1932). TRUE is available to newspapers as a regular feature column. "This is True" is a registered trademark of ThisIsTrue.Inc
COPYRIGHT 2007 by Randy Cassingham, All Rights Reserved. All stories are completely rewritten by Randy Cassingham using facts from the noted sources.
TO COMMENT to the author, mailto:arcie@thisistrue.com -- Please include your first name and location.
Distribution sponsored by Lyris Technologies, Inc.
SUBSCRIPTIONS to "This is True" are free at http://www.thisistrue.com Published weekly by ThisIsTrue.Inc, PO Box 666, Ridgway CO 81432 USA (ISSN 1521-1932). TRUE is available to newspapers as a regular feature column. "This is True" is a registered trademark of ThisIsTrue.Inc
COPYRIGHT 2007 by Randy Cassingham, All Rights Reserved. All stories are completely rewritten by Randy Cassingham using facts from the noted sources.
TO COMMENT to the author, mailto:arcie@thisistrue.com -- Please include your first name and location.
Distribution sponsored by Lyris Technologies, Inc.
shame shame yet another inverse of zero policy incident
Austin Perkins, 17, a senior at Golden Gate High School in Naples FL, was one of several students sent to the office for violating the school's dress code. "This was a group of students who had been talked to before," said Principal Bob Spano.
copyright notice et al
Because there was a group of them, it sort of brought more attention to it.The violation: the students wore coats and ties to school. The school dress code "says 'business dress'," Perkins said.
A coat and tie are business dress.All the boys received in-school suspensions for "exceeding" the school's dress code. (Naples News)
copyright notice et al
when giving the finger is not shooting the bird
When Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe didn't visit a Shinto war shrine on the anniversary of Japan's surrender of World War II, Yoshihiro Tanjo, 54, who heads a "right-wing" political group, was incensed. Abe had avoided the shrine in an attempt to improve relations with China and South Korea, but Tanjo protested by cutting off his little finger and sending it to the Prime Minister. Included in the package: a DVD with
copyright notice et al
very graphic images of him chopping off a part of his finger, which he had filmed himself,said a Kurashiki police spokesman. Tanjo was arrested and charged with intimidation. (AFP)
copyright notice et al
grandbaby gnuz
Abby started pre-school this morning.. She was so excited that she even went on the potty twice yesterday. Even though she's not potty trained they put he with her age group. Hopefully it goes well. Pray for her...
Jason got all sappy this morning.. I told him to suck it up ...it's just preschool...Wait till Kindergarten..then worry...
Even though Abby didn't go on the potty this morning...Hailey did.. amazing..if only ...
Hailey has 12 teeth. She eats ok..Not a big eater. I put her on our scale last night and it said she was only 20 lbs...Either its wrong...or she has lost 3 lbs... I need to check....
She is back in a size three diaper and 18 months clothes. It's a shame because we have lots of things that she will never be able to wear. oh well..
- tweeter
Jason got all sappy this morning.. I told him to suck it up ...it's just preschool...Wait till Kindergarten..then worry...
Even though Abby didn't go on the potty this morning...Hailey did.. amazing..if only ...
Hailey has 12 teeth. She eats ok..Not a big eater. I put her on our scale last night and it said she was only 20 lbs...Either its wrong...or she has lost 3 lbs... I need to check....
She is back in a size three diaper and 18 months clothes. It's a shame because we have lots of things that she will never be able to wear. oh well..
- tweeter
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