Katzie is ill again. See Mark's post at Enough About Me.
Wednesday, January 19, 2011
Tuesday, January 18, 2011
DUVALIER CHARGED WITH CORRUPTION AND EMBEZZLEMENT
From the New York Times:
"[A] good start." We shall see.
Pray for the people of Haiti. Pray for peace in Haiti.
Haitian prosecutors presented formal charges of corruption and embezzlement against the former dictator Jean-Claude Duvalier on Tuesday, raising the level of uncertainty surrounding his abrupt emergence from exile this week.
The case, which involves acts that he is accused of committing before fleeing the country nearly 25 years ago, was presented at the end of a dramatic day during which Mr. Duvalier, one of Haiti’s most polarizing figures, was escorted by heavily armed police officers out of his hotel. Clusters of supporters shouted in outrage, calling for “revolution” and threatening to burn the country down.
Mr. Duvalier, 59, wearing a pin-stripe suit and looking fragile, waved back with one hand while he held onto his companion, Véronique Roy, with the other.
As the police convoy made its way downtown, Mr. Duvalier’s supporters cheered from the roadside. Some tried to block the procession by heaving chunks of concrete and garbage containers onto the road. The crowds eventually thinned, and Mr. Duvalier arrived at a courthouse without further incident.
....
Amnesty International offered muted praise about Haiti’s decision to pursue a case against Mr. Duvalier, calling it a good start.
“If true justice is to be done in Haiti,” the group said in a statement, “the Haitian authorities need to open a criminal investigation into Duvalier’s responsibility for the multitude of human rights abuses that were committed under his rule, including torture, arbitrary detentions, rape, enforced disappearances and extrajudicial executions.”
"[A] good start." We shall see.
Pray for the people of Haiti. Pray for peace in Haiti.
WHEN WE WERE AT CAMBRIDGE...
...for a week....
The post includes many links, but you can follow the story without clicking the links. I included them for those of you who want to know a little more about the places named.
A few days ago, as he was going through papers, Grandpère found our packets from our seminars/vacation at Cambridge University in 1992. The subject of GP's seminar was The Cambridge History of WWII; the American Air Force in England, lecturer, Roger Freeman, from Suffolk, England. My seminar was titled Shakespeare and the Globe Theatre; King Lear, Hamlet, and Macbeth, lecturer, G. Frederick Parker.
Pictured below are the students in the two seminars, as you see, none of us were in the first bloom of youth back in 1992. Grandpère is in the last row, second from left, standing next to the dreamy Jeremy. He was one of the best-looking young men I've ever seen, and he was as good as he was beautiful. He was a student at the university then, and he served as a sort of guide and solver of mini-problems for our groups. There I be in the second row, third from left. The photo was taken in the Old Court at Corpus Christi College, where our lecture rooms were located.
We stayed in rooms at St. Catharine's College, a suite really, as we had a sitting room, bedroom, bath, and small kitchen - nothing elegant, but comfortable and serviceable. We thought perhaps a tutor stayed there during term.
The title of my seminar was not entirely accurate, because the lectures included:
I'd reread, studied really, the three tragedies, so I was unprepared for some of the other plays, since it had been quite a while since I'd read them or seen them performed. But there were no exams or grades, so I listened, learned, and enjoyed. The courses were offered for credit through a university in the US, but we would have had to meet with a tutor and write a paper, which neither GP nor I wanted to do.
One evening, we saw an abbreviated version of Hamlet, the First Quarto, 1603 performed by the Medieval Players. The shorter version of the play was the first published, even before the famed First Folio.
The action-packed drama included lots of sword play and no dithering "To be or not to be...." Hamlet. Since I tend to get impatient with the character Hamlet and find myself thinking, "Just get on with it!", I confess that I very much enjoyed the shortened version. One packet included a sort of playbill, with fascinating information, so I plan to devote a future post to quotes from the playbill.
Our lecturer informed us that the actors in Shakespeare's time were most often not given the complete text of the play, but only their parts and their cues, because there were no copyright laws at the time. What was to prevent anyone from producing the dramatist's play, making money off it, and even passing the play off as one's own work?
During the week, we traveled to Southwark to visit the Shakespeare Memorial at Southwark Cathedral, and the site of the New Globe Theatre, where construction had begun only the year before. The theatre was constructed bay by bay, as the donations came in. If memory serves, two bays were finished by the time of our visit, so we had an idea what the completed theater would look like. Some years later, I saw a performance of The Comedy of Errors at the Globe.
GP was well prepared for his seminar because he is a buff - a World War II buff - and he's read the history and biographies of the period over many years. GP's group visited Bassingbourn Airbase, the base of the US Eighth Army Air Force. In the photo below, GP is at the gun of a B-17 Flying Fortress, in his glory, as you see by the smile on his face. The visit to Bassingbourn was surely one of the high spots of the week for GP. The group also visited the Imperial War Museum at Duxford and the Cambridge American Cemetery and Memorial.
We dined in hall, as they say, at least once or twice, as I remember the fellows sitting at the high table on a platform, and the plebeians, meaning us, at the lower tables. Other times, we had our own place in another dining room, because I remember dinner and definitely breakfast in a more relaxed atmosphere.
Our package for the seminar included breakfast and dinner, with lunch on our own. So far as we can recall, the food at Corpus Christi was tasty, and we had good lunches at pubs in and around Cambridge. I remember one pub particularly, which was right on the River Cam with a beautiful view from the bay window near us.
Below is a scan of the menu for our "Gala Dinner" on the last night of the seminars. Before dinner, we had champagne outside in the court.
In this post, which took me ages to put together, I haven't even mentioned the beauty of the buildings of the university, such as the exquisite Wren Library at Trinity College, the interior of which is pictured below, Evensong at King's College Chapel, or the lovely walks along the River Cam, or the beautiful Botanic Garden, or the wonderful exhibit of William Blake paintings from the Bible, especially those from the Book of Revelation, at the Fitzwilliam Museum.
What a lovely week all around, and what a wonderful time Grandpère and I had reminiscing about our time in Cambridge as I put together this post.
Photo of the New Globe Theatre from Wikipedia.
The post includes many links, but you can follow the story without clicking the links. I included them for those of you who want to know a little more about the places named.
View over Trinity College, Gonville and Caius, Trinity Hall and Clare College towards King's College Chapel, seen from St John's College chapel. On the left, just in front of King's College chapel, is the University Senate House. Wikipedia
A few days ago, as he was going through papers, Grandpère found our packets from our seminars/vacation at Cambridge University in 1992. The subject of GP's seminar was The Cambridge History of WWII; the American Air Force in England, lecturer, Roger Freeman, from Suffolk, England. My seminar was titled Shakespeare and the Globe Theatre; King Lear, Hamlet, and Macbeth, lecturer, G. Frederick Parker.
Pictured below are the students in the two seminars, as you see, none of us were in the first bloom of youth back in 1992. Grandpère is in the last row, second from left, standing next to the dreamy Jeremy. He was one of the best-looking young men I've ever seen, and he was as good as he was beautiful. He was a student at the university then, and he served as a sort of guide and solver of mini-problems for our groups. There I be in the second row, third from left. The photo was taken in the Old Court at Corpus Christi College, where our lecture rooms were located.
We stayed in rooms at St. Catharine's College, a suite really, as we had a sitting room, bedroom, bath, and small kitchen - nothing elegant, but comfortable and serviceable. We thought perhaps a tutor stayed there during term.
The title of my seminar was not entirely accurate, because the lectures included:
"A Midsummer Night's Dream"
"As You Like It"
"Twelfth Night"
"Henry IV" & "Henry V"
"Hamlet"
"'This great stage of fools' - Shakespearean Tragedy"
"'The great globe itself....shall dissolve': The Tempest"
I'd reread, studied really, the three tragedies, so I was unprepared for some of the other plays, since it had been quite a while since I'd read them or seen them performed. But there were no exams or grades, so I listened, learned, and enjoyed. The courses were offered for credit through a university in the US, but we would have had to meet with a tutor and write a paper, which neither GP nor I wanted to do.
One evening, we saw an abbreviated version of Hamlet, the First Quarto, 1603 performed by the Medieval Players. The shorter version of the play was the first published, even before the famed First Folio.
The tragicall historie of Hamlet Prince of Denmarke by William Shake-speare. As it hath been diuerse times acted by his Highnesse seruants in the cittie of London: as also in the two vniuersities of Cambridge and Oxford, and else-where
At London: printed [by Valentine Simmes] for N. L. [Nicholas Ling] and Iohn Trundell, 1603.
[66] p.; 4o.
The action-packed drama included lots of sword play and no dithering "To be or not to be...." Hamlet. Since I tend to get impatient with the character Hamlet and find myself thinking, "Just get on with it!", I confess that I very much enjoyed the shortened version. One packet included a sort of playbill, with fascinating information, so I plan to devote a future post to quotes from the playbill.
Our lecturer informed us that the actors in Shakespeare's time were most often not given the complete text of the play, but only their parts and their cues, because there were no copyright laws at the time. What was to prevent anyone from producing the dramatist's play, making money off it, and even passing the play off as one's own work?
During the week, we traveled to Southwark to visit the Shakespeare Memorial at Southwark Cathedral, and the site of the New Globe Theatre, where construction had begun only the year before. The theatre was constructed bay by bay, as the donations came in. If memory serves, two bays were finished by the time of our visit, so we had an idea what the completed theater would look like. Some years later, I saw a performance of The Comedy of Errors at the Globe.
GP was well prepared for his seminar because he is a buff - a World War II buff - and he's read the history and biographies of the period over many years. GP's group visited Bassingbourn Airbase, the base of the US Eighth Army Air Force. In the photo below, GP is at the gun of a B-17 Flying Fortress, in his glory, as you see by the smile on his face. The visit to Bassingbourn was surely one of the high spots of the week for GP. The group also visited the Imperial War Museum at Duxford and the Cambridge American Cemetery and Memorial.
We dined in hall, as they say, at least once or twice, as I remember the fellows sitting at the high table on a platform, and the plebeians, meaning us, at the lower tables. Other times, we had our own place in another dining room, because I remember dinner and definitely breakfast in a more relaxed atmosphere.
Our package for the seminar included breakfast and dinner, with lunch on our own. So far as we can recall, the food at Corpus Christi was tasty, and we had good lunches at pubs in and around Cambridge. I remember one pub particularly, which was right on the River Cam with a beautiful view from the bay window near us.
Below is a scan of the menu for our "Gala Dinner" on the last night of the seminars. Before dinner, we had champagne outside in the court.
In this post, which took me ages to put together, I haven't even mentioned the beauty of the buildings of the university, such as the exquisite Wren Library at Trinity College, the interior of which is pictured below, Evensong at King's College Chapel, or the lovely walks along the River Cam, or the beautiful Botanic Garden, or the wonderful exhibit of William Blake paintings from the Bible, especially those from the Book of Revelation, at the Fitzwilliam Museum.
What a lovely week all around, and what a wonderful time Grandpère and I had reminiscing about our time in Cambridge as I put together this post.
Photo of the New Globe Theatre from Wikipedia.
"WHO IS MY NEIGHBOR?"
Read Rmj's latest post at Adventus on the words of the new guvna of Alabama, Robert Bentley, as to who are his "brothers and sisters".
MEET LINDA
From the Thibodaux Daily Comet:
Some mornings, she woke to the rural din of crowing roosters and the happy chatter of playing children. On others, the silence was broken by wailing women accompanying one of the funeral processions that ran through the small village almost daily. And at night, the vast sky was a sea of brilliant stars unmuted by earthbound electric light and dominated by the Southern Cross, a constellation only visible below the equator.
Linda Lahme, 64, has spent the past month lying in a bed at Maison De'Ville, a Houma nursing home.
“They tell me I'm dying of cancer,” she said, “but I don't feel very dead.”
In her heart and her head, she still lives in Luapula Province, Zambia, the poverty- and disease-stricken southern-African nation where she spent the past 10 years working to ensure orphaned children had a chance to go to school and eat three meals a day.
“It is the focal point of my life now,” she said. “It's one of the poorest countries in Africa.”
....
Lahme, a retired nurse who spent most of her adult life in Thibodaux, joined the Peace Corps in 2000, three years after her second husband, Winfried Lahme, died of cancer. “I was grieving very much for my husband. It was a very difficult time for me, and I just wanted to get away,” she said. “There was a humanitarian element to that, but my primary purpose was to just reinvent my life somehow.”
She was offered a posting in Zambia working on HIV prevention and education. For two years, her home was a mud hut with a dirt floor and a grass roof that was prone to leaks.
“It was overwhelming,” she said. “I've never been in such a primitive environment in my life.”
Within two years, she had started the Luapula Foundation, which now works to promote sustainable farming, schooling for thousands of orphaned children and educates communities about how HIV spreads and kills.
“It was the need I saw,” she said. “My heart just went out to the children. They would come to me crying and begging not only for food but just for the opportunity to make something of themselves.”
Lahme's latest project is a Christmas fundraiser to buy goats for families in the province, organized through St. John Episcopal Church in Thibodaux. The animals provide milk for direct consumption or making cheese, their waste can be used as fertilizer, and they can survive what can be a harsh climate — hot and dry about half the year and soaking wet during rainy seasons.
“That's my last push before I die from cancer,” she said. “They told me I'm dying. I don't believe them, but that's what they said.”
In church this past Sunday, Linda announced that she will be returning to Zambia next month. Medicaid will no longer pay for her to stay in the nursing home unless she first uses the money she has put aside for her adopted daughter's education to pay the fees at the facility. Linda says, "That is not an option." I asked Linda if she was content to return to Zambia, thinking there might be something we could do to help her stay if she wanted to stay, and she said, "Yes. I want to go." And so she will return to Zambia, where her heart is.
At the same time that I accept that Linda wishes to return to Africa, I am ashamed that our health care system insists that Linda spend her daughter's education funds on her own care before she is able to receive help. Something is very wrong here.
Moses Zulu was working as a environmental-health technician at a rural health center in Luapula when he was introduced to Lahme, who he called “the most compassionate lady in Luapula Province.”
What Moses says is true. And Linda is one of the bravest people I know.
“I still have my round-trip ticket. I did not come here to stay,” she said. “I truly came here believing I would go home. It's expiring in March. We'll see if I'm healed by March. … My doctor tells me I'll be dead by then. Who knows? I sure don't feel like it.”
WANT TO HELP?
To purchase a goat for a Zambian family, send a check for $25, made out to Luapula Foundation to:
Luapula Foundation
c/o St. John's Espiscopal Church
718 Jackson St.
Thibodaux, LA 70301
IF MEN GOT PREGNANT. . .
* Maternity leave would last for two years . . . with full pay.
* There'd be a cure for stretch marks.
* Natural childbirth would become obsolete.
* Morning sickness would rank as the nation's number-one health
problem.
* All methods of birth control would be improved to 100 percent effectiveness.
* Children would be kept in the hospital until they were toilet trained.
* Men would be eager to talk about commitment.
* They wouldn't think twins were quite so cute.
* Fathers would demand that their sons be home from dates by 10:00 p.m.
* Men could use THEIR briefcases as diaper bags.
* They'd have to stop saying, "I'm afraid I'll drop him."
* They'd stay in bed for the entire nine months.
* Menus at most restaurants would list ice cream and pickles as an entree.
* Paternity suits would be a line of clothes.
Cheers,
Paul (A.)
Thanks, Paul. You should know. :-)
* There'd be a cure for stretch marks.
* Natural childbirth would become obsolete.
* Morning sickness would rank as the nation's number-one health
problem.
* All methods of birth control would be improved to 100 percent effectiveness.
* Children would be kept in the hospital until they were toilet trained.
* Men would be eager to talk about commitment.
* They wouldn't think twins were quite so cute.
* Fathers would demand that their sons be home from dates by 10:00 p.m.
* Men could use THEIR briefcases as diaper bags.
* They'd have to stop saying, "I'm afraid I'll drop him."
* They'd stay in bed for the entire nine months.
* Menus at most restaurants would list ice cream and pickles as an entree.
* Paternity suits would be a line of clothes.
Cheers,
Paul (A.)
Thanks, Paul. You should know. :-)
GOOD NEWS FROM THE SUPREMES
From the AP:
Good news on rulings by the US Supreme Court is rare these days.
H/T to Ann Fontaine at The Lead.
The Supreme Court has rejected an appeal from opponents of same-sex marriage who want to overturn the District of Columbia's gay marriage law.
The court did not comment Tuesday in turning away a challenge from a Maryland pastor and others who are trying to get a measure on the ballot to allow Washingtonians to vote on a measure that defines marriage as between a man and a woman.
Good news on rulings by the US Supreme Court is rare these days.
H/T to Ann Fontaine at The Lead.
Monday, January 17, 2011
PLEASE VOTE FOR MATT'S TREES EVERY DAY
The folks at Matt's Trees are not sitting around waiting to see if they win the Pepsi Refresh Project contest. Check out their website.
ON A LIGHTER NOTE....
From Doug:
Sorry, folks, you're only getting the clean limerick. :>)
From Ann:
From Suzanne:
A couple of limmericks...the first is clean :>)
Now the limericks. The first is my favorite clean one.
There was a young lady from Clyde
Who ate a green apple and died
The apple fermented
Inside the lamented
And made cider inside her inside.
Sorry, folks, you're only getting the clean limerick. :>)
From Ann:
From Suzanne:
MARTIN LUTHER KING, JR - JANUARY 15, 1929-APRIL 4, 1968
Martin Luther King, Jr in Montgomery, Alabama, on March 25, 1965
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